"I do declar ', it sets me plumb catawampus ter hev ter listen ter them blacksmiths, up yander ter thar shop, at thar everlastin' chink - chank an 'chink-chank, considerin' the tales I hearn 'bout 'em, when I war down ter the quiltin 'at M'ria's house in the Cove."

The king, his courtiers, and the chief priests being gathered round him, thanksgiving is offered up; and then the lordly beast is knighted, after the ancient manner of the Buddhists, by pouring upon his forehead consecrated water from a chank-shell.

Next he waved mysteriously a few gold coins, then dropped twenty-one drops of cold water out of a jewelled shell, [Footnote: The conch, or chank shell] and finally, muttering something in Sanskrit, and placing in my hand a small silk bag containing a title of nobility and the number and description of the roods of lands pertaining to it, bade me rise, “Chow Khoon Crue Yai”!

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"Long before then there had been visitors from Mesopotamia: pieces of teak--another attraction of the coast--were found by Leonard Wooley at Ur of the Chaldees, dating from around 600 B.C.*"

"* Contacts may well have been still older. Excavations of Mesopotamian cities of the third millennium B.C. have turned up specimens of the Indian chank, a conch shell found only in the coastal waters of southern India and Sri Lanka."--Jack Turner, _Spice: The History of a Temptation_ (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 16-17.

Ornamental daggers dulled by time, palm-leaf scrolls bearing royal signatures, statuettes of the Buddha, tooled betel boxes, gold inlaid areca nut cutters, perforated chank shells, a jumble of tortoiseshell and silver hair combs: they all gave off a disagreeable odor of dust and neglect.--Michelle de Kretser, 2004, The Hamilton Case